Seriously – what’s wrong with you? Have you not been studying the habits of outrageously successful people? Do you not know that competitive edge in the modern world is measured by how early you drag yourself out of your miserable pit?

Look at Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who rises at 5.45 every morning to hit tennis balls for an hour before she hits the phones.

She’s pipped by head of Starbucks Howard Schultz, who gets up at 4.45am so he can put in phone calls to various time zones where his people are still working.

But Schultz is made to look like a sheer and utter lazybones by Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. He gets up at 3.45 and is in the gym by 4am.

Well, I suppose if you’ve got a company worth 200 BILLION QUID to run you can’t just be hitting the snooze button and saying, “Ach, I’ll just have another 10 minutes.”

But Mark Wahlberg – the actor and artist formerly known as Marky Mark of the Funky Bunch – makes these people look like shiftless teenagers.

Are you ready for Wahlberg’s routine? Strap yourselves in…

He gets up at 2.30am then, in his words, “I do an hour’s hard workout from 3-4. Then we (‘we presumably meaning his personal trainer who is getting paid an insane amount of money to endure a routine that the world’s biggest insomniac would find punishing) drive to a basketball court and do two-on-two for an hour.”

At 6am, Wahlberg breakfasts on “chicken and vegetables” before heading to the set of whatever film he’s working on.

Imagine Wahlberg, alone in the gym of his massive house at 3am, owls hooting outside, his wife and four wee children all cosy in bed while he’s in there on his tod, pumping iron like mad, screaming: “YEAH! GET SOME!” and kissing his crazed biceps.

The downside? Marky Mark is in bed and unconscious by 8pm every night. You wonder how on earth did he find the time and energy to have four children?

Gordon Gekko famously said “lunch is for wimps”. It seems that today, sleep must be added to that list too.

Are all these people out of their minds? Is this all just some mad competitive high achievers club? If so, who will be the ultimate winner?

Probably someone who, to paraphrase Monty Python’s four Yorkshire men, gets up at 10.30 at night, half-an-hour before they go to bed.

And I speak as an early riser myself. For a time, I thought I was the kind of writer who worked into the small hours.

There was the romantic notion that you sat up, thinking your deep thoughts in the dead of night.

Unfortunately, most of what I wrote after 9pm was absolute rubbish.

Around 10 years ago, I changed my routine and started getting up at six.

A cup of tea and some quiet time as the sun rises and everyone else is still asleep? What could be finer?

However, getting up at 2.30 on a January morning to pump iron for hours before a no-carb breakfast? That’s for madmen only.